It was a dingy November morning. The old town seemed dull and uneasy, and a tallow-faced clock on a church dawdled behind time, as if it had stopped to let something unpleasant go by. That might have been a posse of melancholy javelin-men, who, with a ludicrous little strutting creature at their head--a sort of pocket drum-major, in sword and cocked hat and with a long staff in his hand--went splashing past at the moment. The court-house, what with the fog and drip, met us like the mouth of a sewer, and I was half-inclined to cry off so disenchanting an adventure, when my companion tossed me up in his arms and carried me within. Through halls and passages, smelling of cold, trodden mud, we were passed with deference, and suddenly were swung and shut into a room where there were lights and a great foggy hush. I saw before me the scarlet judge. I knew him well enough, but never awful like this--a shrunk ferret with piercing eyes looking out of a gray nest. I saw the wigs of the counsel; but their bobtails seemed cocked with an unfamiliar viciousness. I saw the faces of the Jury, set up in two rows like ghostly ninepins; and then I saw another, a face by itself, a face like a little shrewd wicked gurgoyle, that hung yellow and alone out of the mist of the court. And that face, I knew, was the face of Joshua. The terrible silence ticked itself away, and there suddenly was my father standing up before them all, and talking in a quick impassioned voice. My skin went cold and hot. If I reaped little of the dear tones, I understood enough to know that he spoke impetuously for the prisoner, heaping scorn upon the prosecution. Never, he said, in all his experience had he known calumny visit a soul so spotless as the one it was now his privilege to defend. The process would be laughably easy, it was true, and he would only dwell upon what must be to the jury a foregone conclusion--the accused’s innocence, that was to say--with the object to crush with its own vicious fallacies a _pro_secution which, indeed, he could not help remarking bore more the appearance of a _per_secution. Mr. Quayle at this point laughed a little under his breath and whispered, “Bravo!” in my ear, as he eased his burden by resting my feet on the back of a bench. As for me, I was burning and shooting all over with pride, as my eyes went from my father to the poor little ugly prisoner in the dock, and back again.